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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Stress baking: A primer

Some people stress-eat. Some stress-drink. Others stress-exercise.
I have been known to do all three (I might be lying about doing one of them.
Guess which).

But when the shit really hits the fan, I have my own crazy
way of dealing with stress. I make ludicrously elaborate baked goods and care
packages.

This particular coping mechanism seems to be triggered
by surgery. It started in July of 2009 when the weather was hot, I was two days
away from a scheduled C-section, and my feet had swelled out of every pair of
shoes on earth, including a couple of huge, borrowed men’s flip-flops.

It was at this terribly uncomfortable time in my life that
my dear friend, Robin, was also about to go under the knife for appendicitis,
so I “sprang” (as much as a 500-weeks pregnant person can “spring”) into
action. I waddled my two-bills body to the nearest liquor store and bought a
bottle of Robin’s favorite Patrón
tequila, a stack of trashy magazines, and some high-calorie treats, and put
them together into a care package.

Then I had a baby and forgot to mail the package, so my mom mailed it
for me.

Flash-forward a few years, and said baby is now four years
old. My husband, Brian, is having surgery on his ankle, so naturally I signed
up to make something for a PTA bake sale on the same day. It’s just day
surgery, so I bake in the handful of hours between kissing him goodbye in front
of the hospital and picking him up in his drugged-out, post-surgical haze.

Instead of baking something easy and low-stress, like cookies
from store-bought dough, I insist on making Martha
Stewart’s pumpkin-cream cheese whoopie pies, complete with homemade filling.
I take it all a step further by individually bagging each pie in professional-looking
plastic baked-goods bags, twisting them closed with pretty gold ties, and
tagging them with lovely computer-printed labels that I painstakingly designed
myself.

A few months later, it’s the eve of my four-year-old
daughter’s spinal cord surgery, and I have a choice. I can either curl up, wailing
and dry-heaving, on the bathroom floor in worried anticipation or make homemade
marshmallows and graham crackers for s’mores gift boxes.

I choose the latter. Using the fabulous “Made
From Scratch” cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen, I whip homemade
marshmallows out of gelatin and sugar syrup, and bake homemade graham crackers
in less than an hour.

Incidentally, people look at me like I have a third eye when
they hear that you can make graham crackers at home. They’re worth the (very little) effort
that goes into them. The hardest part about making
them was finding graham flour; which is to say, it's not hard at all, since graham flour is stocked
at my local grocery store with other alternate flours, like rice flour. Making
homemade graham crackers is no more difficult than making your own cookies; it’s
actually quite the same process as making pie dough. But unlike cookies, pie
dough, or even yeast bread, homemade crackers seem to be something that people
just abandoned once they became mass produced. Seriously, the homemade ones
are soooo much better. (Although it turns out that Chloe doesn’t like graham
crackers of any kind. She handed back the homemade one after one bite, and
rejected ones that the nurses offered her as one of her first post-surgical
foods. She later claimed to also dislike the word “graham.”)

But I digress. After cutting the marshmallows and graham
crackers into their respective rectangles, I wrapped a stack of each in
cellophane and nestled the packages into tins along with a bar of organic,
stone-ground Taza Chocolate from the nearby Taza Chocolate Factory in Somerville,
Massachusetts. I put thoughtful notes into each package for the two food
editors that I intended to send them to. I affixed a cute little sticker that reads, "Toast (a marshmallow) to 2014."

Then my daughter had surgery, and I forgot to mail the packages.

Days later, my daughter is still in the hospital, and I'm operating on little more than stress and French Roast coffee. I dispatch my husband to the UPS
store to mail the s’mores packages, forgetting that I had addressed the cards
inside them to two different people. And of course, he inadvertently mailed
each of the otherwise-identical packages to the wrong person. Sigh.

But really, the process of making these foods and gift
packages was so much more important to me than the final outcome (although getting them to the right editor would have been nice). These projects
allowed me to concentrate all my energy on a complicated task. I wasn’t pacing around
the house waiting for the nurse to call after Brian got out of surgery, or
wailing and dry-heaving on the bathroom floor the night before I let someone
cut open my baby’s back. Instead I was rushing to bake, bag, and tag as many
whoopie pies as possible in a few hours. I was worrying that the edges of my
graham crackers were coming out a little too brown.

Worrying about my husband and daughter would come later. So would the pacing and the tears. But at least I had homemade whoopie pies and s'mores fixin's to stress-eat along the way.